Jackson Pollock (20 page)

Soon after Pollock lost his job his mother visited him from Connecticut. “Well the
WPA folded up,” she noted to Charles on February 10. “Lee was let out the first of
the year—she is taking a drafting course gets $17.00 a week while learning. Jack is
going to take a course of some sort. He has done several new paintings very nice since
I was down in November. Hope he finds something to do soon.”

It was an exasperating time for Pollock, for besides being out of work, he suddenly
found himself without any art supplies. (The Project had provided him with free supplies.)
Hoping he might be able to trade a painting for some supplies, he went to talk to
Lou Rosenthal, who owned a store on Eighth Street, across from his apartment. Was
Rosenthal willing to trade twenty-five dollars worth of supplies for one Pollock painting?
No, the businessman told him, he couldn’t afford to; his apartment was already cluttered
with paintings by unknown artists. So Pollock went to talk to Joseph Mayer, another
art store owner, but Mayer too said he couldn’t afford to trade.

In his frustration Pollock apparently took to shoplifting.
Mayer was in his store one day when he spotted Pollock stuffing tubes of oil paints
into his coat pockets. “Can I help you?” Mayer asked. Pollock continued to pocket
the paint. “No, thank you,” he said arrogantly, “I can help myself.” The kindly businessman
didn’t stop Pollock as he left the store.

In February 1943, after a month of unemployment, Pollock found a job with Creative
Printmakers, a silk-screening shop on Eighteenth Street. He was hired on the night
shift as “a squeegee man,” a job that consisted of sitting at a table and pushing
a squeegee back and forth across a screen to print designs on scarves and plates.
It was tedious work, but he seemed not to mind it too much, relieved to have found
any work at all.

Within two months Pollock heard about a job he very much wanted. The Baroness Hilla
Rebay, director of the Museum of Non-Objective Art (later the Solomon R. Guggenheim
Museum), was hiring young artists to help run the museum and was offering them monthly
stipends in addition to free art supplies. In April Pollock went for a job interview—the
museum was then located in a townhouse on East Fifty-fourth Street—and brought along
a few of his paintings with hopes of impressing the baroness. In the course of the
interview Rebay asked Pollock whether he had brought a résumé. A résumé? But weren’t
his paintings his résumé? A few days later Pollock sent the baroness a truly inventive
résumé. “Biography” he scrawled sloppily at the top of a sheet of paper. After stating
that he was born in Cody and had studied at the Art Students League, Pollock divided
the page into three sections—“past,” “present,” and “extended present.” He defined
his past as “Subjective realism” and “Subjective abstract.” He defined his present
as “Subjective [and] Spacial reality,” which branched off into “non-objective spacial
intensity.” He was open-minded about his future: “?”

He got the job.

At the museum Pollock assisted with sundry tasks. He ran the elevator, counted visitors
as they came in, and was often sent down to the basement to help make frames. While
he tended to his chores with his usual eagerness to make himself of use, he quickly
acquired a reputation as a braggart. The painter and musician
Leland Bell, a coworker at the museum, later recalled his amusement at Pollock’s frequent
jabs at the collection. Pointing to an Arp, Pollock would say, “I could do an Arp
easy!” He was particularly hard on Paul Klee, who was fond of making small pictures
and whose work, Pollock claimed, lacked monumentality. “Klee? I could do a Klee easy.”
No one took him very seriously.

From the day he started work, Pollock made a point of keeping out of the way of Baroness
Rebay, a fanatical devotee of nonobjective art. She was a great promoter of Kandinsky
and championed his belief that nonobjective painting was not so much an art movement
as a mission to free people from material concerns. Businessmen in particular, the
baroness believed, could benefit from abstract art, “as it carries them away from
the tiresome rush of the earth.”

The baroness required that all her assistants bring in their work on a monthly basis
so she could criticize it. Pollock was glad to comply. For his first critique he brought
in a drawing that was typical of his current style, combining Picasso-like figures
with freely scrawled calligraphy. The baroness went rigid when she saw the drawing.
With a long steel rod she pointed to a form that resembled a human figure. “This,”
she said in her German accent, “NO!” She tore his drawing in half.

But while the baroness was insulting Pollock, a much more influential member of the
Guggenheim circle had already recognized his talent. Peggy Guggenheim owned a celebrated
gallery called Art of This Century. The place was loathed by the baroness, who, as
self-appointed guardian of Solomon Guggenheim’s reputation, felt that his art-dealing
niece had sullied the family name by propagating “mediocrity, if not trash.”

No one in New York was to play a larger role as a collector, dealer, and art patron
during the war years than Peggy Guggenheim. The daughter of a copper magnate, she
had grown up on East Seventy-second Street with the Stillmans and Rockefellers for
neighbors but fled her staid surroundings at an early age. She spent the twenties
in Paris, where she became part of a group of American expatriate artists and writers,
and in 1938 she opened a
gallery in London called Guggenheim Jeune. But she was much more interested in collecting
art than selling it and soon closed the London gallery with hopes of starting her
own museum. Her goal, she once said, was to buy “a picture a day,” and she more or
less succeeded at it. As the war raged she tramped through the studios of Paris with
a shopping list in hand and quickly amassed a leading collection of modern art.

After arriving in New York as a refugee from the war—she managed to get her art collection
to the U.S. by shipping it as “household goods”—Peggy Guggenheim opened a gallery,
in October 1942, on the top floor of 30 West Fifty-seventh Street. (She called it
a gallery-museum and, with characteristic stinginess, charged all visitors twenty-five
cents admission.) Frederick Kiesler had helped her design the place, and it was surely
the most eccentric-looking gallery in New York. In the room reserved for abstract
art, frames were taken off paintings, paintings were taken off walls, the walls themselves
were removed; the art, supported by brackets, jutted into space against a backdrop
of undulating blue linen. A second room, reserved for Surrealism, was comparatively
conservative, featuring concave walls of unfinished wood and a lighting system that
alternately illumined and darkened bizarre exhibits; in one corner a whirring motor
brought small Klees into view for ten seconds each. Art of This Century quickly became
the principal gathering place for the European artists who were living in New York.

Peggy Guggenheim’s detractors used to say that her success as an art collector was
due entirely to her advisers, who told her what to buy. This is no doubt true, but
it is to her credit that she chose her mentors well. Her primary advisers in New York
were Marcel Duchamp, Alfred Barr—the visionary director of the Museum of Modern Art—and
James Johnson Sweeney, an art and literary critic who was close to Barr and would
soon be hired by him to direct the museum’s painting and sculpture department. Another
key figure at the gallery was a man named Howard Putzel, a rotund, nervous, chain-smoking
art dealer from San Francisco who had worked for Peggy Guggenheim in Paris as a commission
buyer and was her assistant at Art of This Century. He was to become a close friend
of Pollock and Lee.

One day in 1943 Pollock and Motherwell visited the gallery along with Matta, who introduced
the two young painters to Peggy Guggenheim. Their names were not unknown to her; Matta
had been trying to convince her for some time to visit their studios and consider
showing their work at the gallery. Peggy was not averse to the idea of showing Americans
alongside Europeans. She was then working out the details of a large collage show
scheduled for April. Dozens of artists were participating, including Kurt Schwitters,
Ernst, Picasso, and Braque, all of whom had worked widely in collage and the last
of whom is often credited with inventing it, in 1912. There was no reason why the
show couldn’t include some Americans as well, and acting on the advice of Matta, Peggy
asked Pollock and Motherwell whether they were interested in submitting some collages
to the show. Neither of the two had ever made a collage, nor was it something they
had aspired to. But they had no intention of turning down the chance to exhibit at
the most exciting gallery in New York. Collage? We love collage!

For purposes of mutual support Motherwell suggested to Pollock that they work together.
Pollock agreed, which, says Motherwell, “I regard as something of a miracle, when
I think of what a loner he was.” Pollock even volunteered his studio as a work site,
since it was the better equipped of the two. Together the two artists tore, pasted,
and composed, trying to make collages that could hold their own next to Picasso’s
and Braque’s legendary combinations of sheet music, cardboard, chair caning, playing
cards, and the like. For Motherwell the experience turned out to be a revelation.
He appreciated the quick-drying properties of collage, which eliminated the tedious
problem of having to wait for oil paint to dry before going back to revise—and Motherwell’s
art had so far been a process of ongoing revision. He would make many more collages
and was later to emerge (as was Lee Krasner) as a master of the medium. For Pollock
the experience was also a revelation. He realized he did not like making collages.
No amount of tearing or pasting could allow him to capture the spontaneity or immediacy
of even one brushstroke or one sketched line. Unimpressed with his finished product,
Pollock applied a match to the paper and burned the edges.

Pollock’s debut at Art of This Century was somewhat anticlimactic. His name was misspelled
as “Pollach” on the exhibition announcement, and his participation went unnoticed
by the press, save for a lone reviewer who described his collage as “nice.” The collage
didn’t sell. After the show closed, Pollock took it home and threw it away.

It was the last time Pollock went unnoticed. In April 1943, while the collage show
was still on exhibit, Peggy Guggenheim announced plans to hold the first of her annual
“Spring Salons,” a competition-exhibition for young artists working in America. Advertisements
were placed in the art magazines soliciting recent work by artists under thirty-six,
and a jury was selected. Pollock, in accordance with the rules, dropped off a painting
at the gallery, choosing to submit his
Stenographic Figure
. (At the time it was titled simply
Painting
.)

On the day set aside for jurying, Mondrian was the first of the judges to arrive at
the gallery. As Peggy Guggenheim busily arranged paintings around the room, Mondrian
walked over to Pollock’s
Painting
and spent a few moments looking at it. “Pretty awful, isn’t it?” Peggy asked him.
“That’s not painting, is it?” She came back twenty minutes later to find Mondrian
still looking at the Pollock. “There is absolutely no discipline at all,” she said.
“This young man has serious problems . . . and painting is one of them. I don’t think
he’s going to be included.” She told Mondrian that she felt a little bit awkward about
rejecting Pollock from the “Spring Salon” because Matta had endorsed him highly and
so had her assistant, Howard Putzel. As Peggy Guggenheim talked, Mondrian continued
to study the Pollock. He turned to her suddenly. “Peggy,” he said. “I don’t know.
I have a feeling that this may be the most exciting painting that I have seen in a
long, long time, here or in Europe.”

As the other jurors arrived—they included Duchamp and Alfred Barr—Peggy ushered them
across the room one by one. “I want you to see something very exciting,” she told
them. “It’s by someone called Pollock.”

The “Spring Salon for Young Artists” opened at the gallery in May 1943, and the show
marked a turning point for Pollock. He
was singled out in the press as the one painter in the show—there were more than thirty
altogether—who possessed unmistakable talent. Jean Connolly, who was then living with
Peggy Guggenheim, reported in
The Nation
that the painting had made the jury “starry-eyed.” A more objective viewer, Robert
Coates, of
The New Yorker
, felt that most of the work in the show was amateurish but that “in Jackson Pollock’s
abstract ‘Painting,’ with its curious reminiscences of both Matisse and Miró, we have
a real discovery.”

The painting did not sell, but Pollock had accomplished the more difficult task of
winning critical acclaim. Only six months earlier Peggy Guggenheim had listened almost
indifferently as Matta had informed her of the existence of several young American
painters whom she might want to include in the frequent group shows at the gallery.
Now she was considering turning over the entire gallery to the work of one American—she
was thinking of giving Pollock a one-man show. But first she needed to know whether
he was capable of producing enough good paintings to justify such an event. She made
an appointment to see his work, arranging to stop by his studio on the afternoon of
June 26, the day the “Spring Salon” closed.

Peggy Guggenheim arrived at 46 East Eighth Street on Saturday afternoon, as scheduled.
She knocked. No one answered. Where could they possibly be? she wondered angrily.

That morning Pollock and Lee had attended the wedding of their friend Peter Busa at
his apartment in the Village. Only a few minutes before the nuptials began, Pollock,
who was supposed to be best man, had helped himself to a few drinks and proceeded
to fall facedown on the living room floor. He was dragged into a bedroom, where he
slept contentedly until the ceremony ended, at which point Lee, in a frantic mood,
rushed to his side to shake him into consciousness and remind him that today was the
most important day of his life: Peggy Guggenheim was coming to his studio to see his
work and decide whether she should give him a one-man show. As Pollock mumbled incoherently,
Lee grabbed him by the arm and took him to a drugstore to sober him up with coffee.